The King of Thrones

Ashish Kulkarni has a doctorate in chemical engineering. He used to develop plastics for General Electric. Now he's in the bowels of a research facility in central New Jersey, dropping golf balls into a toilet. "Three, six, nine, twelve …," he tallies, each count punctuated with a small splash. Eventually the toilet - one of five mounted chest-high along a wall - holds 24 Titleists. Kulkarni hits the flush lever and a full-throated whoosh roars from the plumbing. Two dozen balls tumble out of the bowl, captured in a wire basket hung beneath the outflow line.

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Yes, he's heard all the jokes. "If I ever have to flush 24 golf balls in real life, I've got a problem," Kulkarni says. But as chief engineer for American Standard, he needs a clever, clean way to demonstrate the power of the Champion, the company's new ultraflusher. The tests continue: Kulkarni grabs a bucket of flexible, 4-inch vinyl tubes he calls water wigglers. Unlike golf balls, the wigglers float, providing another challenge worthy of a Champion. "Three, six, nine …," he counts, loading the bowl with 14 wigglers. Whoosh. Another perfect flush.

For most people, toilets are a private perch, a place for quiet contemplation. But not for plumbing researchers. Their job demands that they dream of toilets that never were and ask, "Why not?" Lately they've been pushing hard. Ever since regulators clamped down on the volume of water allowed per flush, more users have reported clogs. New low-flow toilets, great in theory, just aren't cutting it. Independent testers, frustrated by the industry's lackadaisical response to these problems, have started to apply the same kind of pressure to toilet makers that JD Power did to car companies in the 1980s. The result: Manufacturers have begun using computer models and sophisticated math to create toilets that flush cleaner, faster, quieter, and more efficiently.

To understand the search for the perfect crapper, step into the American Sanitary Plumbing Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. It's not a big place - you were expecting the Met? - but next to the exhibit of 19th-­century toilet paper (unused) sit the museum's crown jewels: the commode collection. The earliest specimens are fancy chamber pots, a reminder that until quite recently our ancestors completed their digestive process by squatting over a bucket and throwing the results out a window. There's a reason the word plague figures so prominently in history texts.

Englishman John Harington invented the toilet in 1596, but his technology didn't take hold for centuries. Upstairs in the plumbing museum rests the 1891 Nautilus, which uses an elevated tank of water to do its dirty work. When it's flushed, a valve opens, emptying the tank into the bowl. Gravity and momentum pull the water into an S-shaped trapway, creating a siphon into the sewer. If this sounds familiar, that's because this 114-year-old technological ­wonder is basically the device in your bathroom.

For most of the 20th century, toilet innovation consisted of breakthroughs like new colors of porcelain. But in 1992, the US Congress kickstarted some creativity by mandating that new toilets reduce the amount of water used per flush from about 3.5 gallons down to 1.6.

The first low-flow toilets defeated their own purpose - they didn't have enough power to clear the bowl, forcing users to double-flush, wield plungers, or persuade their plumber to illegally re­install an old toilet. As complaints mounted, manufacturers realized the designs that worked fine with 3.5 gallons of water needed an extreme makeover to work with less.

The science of how water flows through a system of twisting pipes is phenomenally complicated - even before you stir in golf balls, water wigglers, or feces. Less water means less energy to clear the bowl. So manufacturers tried increasing the size of the flush valve at the bottom of the tank from 2 inches to 3 inches, allowing more water in more quickly, increasing its force. They also increased the diameter of the trapway at the bottom, letting more "bulk waste" - that's Number Two - pass through without clogs.

To squeeze more performance out of their new commodes, the toilet gurus turned to computer modeling. "The computational fluid dynamics software we use allows us to focus on the right contours, the right radii, the right tolerances," says Kathryn Streeby, a marketing manager at Kohler. It's all math: Bernoulli's principle by way of differential equations. "For water not to lose energy, there are certain ways you need to design the channels," Kulkarni says. "You want to have smooth corners, and you want to make sure there are no stagnant positions or barriers to water flow." In 2002, American Standard had zero PhDs at its R&D center; now it has seven. At Kohler, toilet research includes two former aerospace engineers. Who says this isn't rocket science?

Makers of consumer goods generally try to evaluate their new tech under real-world conditions. For obvious reasons, that presents some problems with toilets. Decorum and taboo prevent researchers from testing fixtures with actual human waste, forcing them to rely on golf balls, sponges, sawdust, oatmeal and other "test media."

But there's nothing quite like the real thing. That lack of precision offended Toronto civil engineer Bill Gauley, who'd been working with home builders and water authorities to figure out which low-flow toilets really did save water. So in 2000, he began a search for the perfect fake shit.

To start, he went to his kitchen and mixed flour, mashed potatoes, cocoa powder, and water. The resemblance to real feces was striking, but his concoction got moldy and mushy too fast. Then, during a visit to the Japanese toilet maker Toto, Gauley observed researchers flushing cylinders of brown goop. It was miso, the fermented soy protein used in soup. In performance and appearance, the resemblance to the real deal was almost disturbing in its completeness. But alas, the Toto guys wouldn't divulge the proprietary recipe.

So Gauley began buying various brands of miso at Japanese food stores, trying to determine which was the shittiest. He found a winner, the name of which he's contractually bound to keep a secret. It makes a hell of a good soup, and extruded into 4-inch-long cylinders with an oversize caulk gun, it looks just like … progress.